Colorblind-Racism & Popular Culture

Historical Context• 1960s-70s: Race-based movements grounded issues of racism

through a critique of US capitalism (political economics).

• Push for State/Federal Government to provide resources for historically marginalized communities

• Racism and Classism as interlocking systems of oppression.

• 1980s-90s: Official Antiracism did away with overt racial oppression by consuming racialized cultural property.

http://vimeo.com/11154217

Post-Civil Rights Legacies of Race, Racism

• The Twilight of White America?

• Affirmative Action discriminates against poor whites (Reverse Racism)

• People of color are equal to white people now (Colorblind Theory)

• Erasure of Western colonialism and genocide, as well as institutionalized racial privileges & systematic discrimination.

Popular Culture • A site, space, and tool for the normalization of society

with respect to ideas, beliefs, and perspectives.

• “The power of popular culture lies in its ability to distort, shape, and produce reality, dictating the ways in which we think, feel, and operate in the social world” (286 in RCL).

Historical Racisms thru American Pop. Culture • Contemptible Collectibles (p. 286)• Consumption of blackness • Caricatures • Postcards• Children toys

• 19th Century minstrelsy shows • Playing Blackness (or Playing Indian) allowed whites to

figure out how to “Play Whiteness”

Significance & Limitations to Subject Positionality• “When he [a white man] laughed, it made me

uncomfortable. As a matter of fact, that was the last thing I shot… because my head almost exploded.”

(Dave Chappelle on why he pulled the plug…pg. 291 in RCL).

• Interpersonal interactions (p. 292)• E.g. Crash (2005) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

(1967) • The Myth of Reverse Racism

Affirmative Action • Chris Rock defines….

• Minority Scholarships & White Disadvantage on College Campuses • Less than 4% of scholarship money in the U.S. is represented by

awards that consider race as a factor at all• 0.25% of ALL undergrad scholarship dollars come from awards that

are restricted to persons of color alone. • 3.5% of college students of color receive any scholarship partially

based on race; these data’s suggest the pathetically small piece of financial aid opportunities made available to address historical-materialist realities.

Source: U.S. General Accounting Office, Information on Minority Targeted Scholarships, B251634 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, January 1994).

Affirmative Action [for Whites]

• Since at least half a century, 1/5 of Harvard’s students have received admissions preference because their parents attend the school.

• White children of affluent alumni—”legacies”—are 3Xs more likely to be accepted to Harvard than high school kids who lack that handsome lineage.

• U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found the average admitted “legacy” at Harvard in the 1980s was significantly less qualified than the average admitted nonlegacy.

• A legacy is twice as likely to be admitted as a black or Hispanic student. Source: “Why Are Droves of Unqualified, Unprepared Kids Getting into Our Top Colleges?: Because Their Dads Are Alumni” by

John Larew in Privilege: A Reader pp. 39-48.

On Reverse Racism• Whites have never been the targets of institutional

oppression in the United States (ethnicity yes, but as whites, persons of European descent have been the dominant group.)

• Racism is the SYSTEMATIC (structure, ideologies, institutions) privileging of one group of people, at the expense of another group of people.

• So, to classify oneself as part of a victim-group (e.g. Youth for Western Civilization), that group must first be proven to have been/being systematically oppressed.

Perpetuating “Sincere Ignorance and Conscientious Stupidity”

“Finally, to organize as whites in a white-dominated society where whites have eleven times the average net worth of blacks and eight times the average net worth of Latinos/Latinas, where they have unemployment rates half that of blacks and poverty rates one-third as high as that for blacks and Latinos/Latinas, and where they run virtually every major

institution in the nation is by definition to organize for the continuation of that domination and supremacy. It is to seek to enshrine their head start; to seek the perpetuation of hegemony established in a system of formal

apartheid, as if to say that that system was perfectly legitimate and worthy of survival. It is fundamentally different than for a minority group

to organize collectively so as to secure its interests, because minority interests and opportunities cannot be assumed or taken for granted as a

function of their lesser power, whereas those of the majority typically can.”

--Tim Wise, “On White Pride, Reverse Racism, and Other Delusions” In Privilege: A Reader, pp. 133-144

Colorblindness Racial Equality“The problem with the

strangehold popular culture has over

dictating the way that the populace “knows”

people of color is that for people who have very

little real, interpersonal experience with

individuals from these groups, they can believe in an essentialist vision

composed of every stereotype and myth

promoted.” (294)

• This week provided an introduction to understanding the significance and power of popular culture in validating, disseminating, and ultimately justifying racial stereotypes and historical inaccuracies.

• Popular culture is a site where we can see how legacies of racism are maintained by a white heteropatriarchal racist framework.

• Popular culture as a space where the struggle for hegemony occurs.